Games that have color problems
Dirk Chegigo
United States Salt Lake City Utah
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This is a list of games that have bits or cards that are hard to distinguish from each other because of color. Please add.
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1.
Board Game: Rage
[Average Rating:6.19 Overall Rank:1675]

Dirk Chegigo
United States Salt Lake City Utah
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The Red and Orange in this Amigo version are just too darn close.
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Dirk Chegigo
United States Salt Lake City Utah
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I understand there is a problem with the color scheme on this game too. Hope to get it soon so I can see for myself.
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Dirk Chegigo
United States Salt Lake City Utah
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Another Red - Orange problem in the Plenary Games version. Solved in later versions and there is an exchange program to get gold bits.
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Jesse Miller
United States Gettysburg Pennsylvania
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Trying to play this in a dimly lit room can be difficult--some of the suit colors are just too similar.
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Michel Fortin
Canada Longueuil Québec
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The blue and purple personnality cards are almost of the same color. The brown and pink cards have the same problem, to a lesser degree. The first time we played, we had to stop, spread out the various cards and actually discuss their "membership". To make matter worst, the purple cards do not match the purple on the board. When you don't have the two colors in your hand (blue and purple), it's very easy to make a mistake. I can't believe it passed the quality control tests (or even play tests), if there were any.
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Michel Fortin
Canada Longueuil Québec
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The "Red Fox" and "Nougat" plastic horses are easily confused. I understand the colors were chosen in a realistic way. It would have been strange to have blue, purple and green horses and, with seven horse colors to choose, it probably was impossible to do better.
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Aleister Finchley
United Kingdom Unspecified Unspecified
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The yellow walls and the neutral(unpainted) ones look very similar under some lighting conditions. I'm going to have to paint them in a bright white.
They don't look too bad in this picture, though.
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Michael Rosen
United States East Amherst New York
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I'm red/green color blind. I open this game and find purple, green, red, and brown for colors. Surprisingly, I can tell the difference between the green and red. Sadly, the brown and red look identical to me.
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Gert Keijer-Spaink
Netherlands Utrecht
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The red and orange villages, roads etc etc look very much alike. When i bought my copy way way beak (i think it's a first german edition not yet published by Cosmos but by Franchk) the problem was even bigger. The orange cities were so dark that they lokked red. The publisher even put in an extr set of lighter collerd orange cities so i have an extra set of cities in an intermediate color.
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Kelly Bass
United States Venice California
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I think the graphics were designed so the city looks "cool" when all the cards are laid out. Unfortunately, each card only has a hint of color. I would really prefer cards with much more obvious color on each one.
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Kelly Bass
United States Venice California
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Of the 4 currencies, blue & yellow are fine, but having burnt-orange and brown is confusing. Check out the 3 cards at the top of the picture (burnt orange, blue, brown). On another edition, they have thankfully changed brown to green.
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Mikko Saari
Finland
http://www.lautapeliopas.fi/ - the best Finnish board game resource!
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Backs of the red and purple cards are very difficult to tell apart in dimmer light.
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Doug Orleans
United States Somerville Massachusetts
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Same color problems as 10 Days In Africa, especially matching the planes to the pink & orange countries. It doesn't help that each plane card has multiple shades on it.
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Andrea Angiolino
Italy Rome European Union
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We used to play the Italian edition "Parco della Vittoria" at the dim and slightly colored light of a pub in Rome... You could hardly tell which metal pawn belonget to which player. Red & orange where particularly close to each other, but all four of them had problems.
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Eric Nielsen
United States Boston Massachusetts
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Cosmic Encounter has extremely poor color selection and printing, by using gradients instead of solid colors.
The only reason it's not colorblind-hostile is because the game is designed around chaos and imbalance. A colorblind player selecting random tokens to make random attacks actually helps the game.
At least one color-normal player should be involved in every game to identify when somebody has won.
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Jim Cote
United States
Maine
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Could have been slightly better constrast.
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Hans Persson
Sweden Linköping Unspecified
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This comes with pieces in white, yellow, green, and blue. So far so good. Then there's a red one and a very dark pink one. If the light's good I can tell they are different, but not which one is which. But then I'm not color blind.
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Hans Persson
Sweden Linköping Unspecified
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There are chits for six players. One pair is blue and blueish-green. One pair is red and slightly-purplish-red. The last pair is tan and orange. Up to four players should be fine, and five probably in good light, but I wouldn't want to try it with six.
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Bob Wilson
United States Northampton Massachusetts
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Prize Property is an old, hardly played game, but a great one... except for the horrible closeness of the red and orange buildings.
Luckily in this game, each player is developing only within a given quadrant of the gameboard, so it limits the confusion.
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Bob Wilson
United States Northampton Massachusetts
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I'm shocked no one added this item yet. Railroad Tycoon (RRT) is one of the worst offenders.
You have:
1.) A map with shockingly-close Purple and Blue cities for the color-challenged (and even the "normal sighted") to distinguish.
2.) Color cubes to deliver, again with the Blue-Purple problem, but not as bad.
3.) Suggestions that the next version will have a fix, but players creating their own in the meantime. Some of them, like the image included with this post, are almost as bad as the original.
What's needed is some science (usability experts, interface designers, etc.) to tell us which colors, and in one place on the gray-scale (1 to 10 from light to dark) are best destinguished by even the smallest minority of the color-challenged.
There are many types of color-blindness, and there are as many as 16 genes effecting it. So there must be a set of colors which is visible and distinguishable by just about everybody.
Anyone have any empirical data to share on the matter?
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Sue Hemberger
Washington Dist of Columbia
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Knizia kid's game. Red and orange are hard to distinguish. Otherwise, nice bits.
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The color on the backs of the encounter cards don't perfectly match up with the colors on the board, so until you get used to it, you have to compare (usually just the browns) and choose which one makes the most sense from the choices. (It doesn't really matter, because if you guess wrong your location wont be listed, but still... it bothers me)
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Dirk Chegigo
United States Salt Lake City Utah
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Pink and Orange on the cards are almost identical. There is a better contrast on the board.
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Dayton
Indiana
Clarkston
Michigan
Another pet peeve mentioned above here is to have families of colors like in 10 Days in Africa. The cards don't match the board. Now if you know that this card is green and the board is a slightly lighter shade, but still green that works for non-color-blind people, but doesn't do a thing for us spectrally challenged individuals. Other games group the green pieces (light, mid and dark) as a faction and that isn't useful to me. If the shades are all different from each other, I can memorize which go together though.
I can't stress icons enough. They rule. When I have a card game that I enjoy except for the color, I rubber stamp little icons (maybe even in matching colors
And don't feel bad, Yekrats, one of Mayfair's major playtesters is colorblind and they still put out games that don't work colorwise.
Happy Gaming,
Phoenix
Arizona
Boston
Massachusetts
Secondary clues are the best solution. Icons, shapes, fill patterns, outlines, etc, all work wonderfully. Even if they are subtle, we will notice them.
Bryan
TX
The colors I prefer (for six players):
White and/or Black (depending on special pieces)
if you can't use white and/or black, I've included two extra colors that *should* be colorblind friendly:
-stopsign Red
-Teal (light blueish green, more green than blue)
-Navy Blue (a medium to dark blue, almost smurf or ocean colored)
-Electric Neon Yellow (or bright construction yellow)
-hunter green
-pumpkin orange
(construction yellow also contrasts well with construction orange and construction red)
and of note, the green and yellow on BGG are poor color combos